Monday, November 21, 2016

Book Review: A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey

I will hold you in suspense no longer: the reason why I did
a review of Frank Conniff’s Twenty
Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life In No Way
Whatsoever last week was that I purchased the Kindle edition shortly after
the e-book I’m reviewing this week—A
Year at the Movies: One Man’s Filmgoing Odyssey.A Year
at the Movies was penned by Conniff’s MST3K colleague Kevin Murphy, an
actor-writer who was chiefly responsible for breathing life into “Tom Servo,”
one of the “bots” on that cult TV series.Kev’s book was selling for $1.99 at Amazon (thank you, BookBub) and I
figured it was worth a flutter (it’s regularly $12.99); after making that
purchase I spotted the Conniff book and thought: “Why not make this a double
feature?”

I think Murphy has written the better book, to be frank (see
what I did there).It’s quite funny at
times, and chronicles in detail an experiment Kev decided to conduct: going to
the movies once a day, every day, for an entire year.It’s a task best undertaken by professionals,
because Murphy had to sit through some pretty awful movies in 2001 (the year he
decided to embark on this project).His
impressions on these bits of cinematic offal often make up the laugh-out-loud
portions of his book; since Warren Beatty has a new movie out, let’s look back
at the last time he presented moviegoers with an example of why he should
seriously consider just resting on his laurels:

“For the love of all that is holy
and decent, do not see Town &
Country. Not at a theater, not on
video, not on cable, satellite, or broadcast television. Do not glance at it as it spills out from
someone’s portable DVD player. Put on an
eye mask and go to sleep if it winds up on your flight. If you are invited to dinner at your friends’
trim suburban home, grope through their personal belongings while they’re
putting the sea bass and Italian eggplant on the grill; if you happen across a
copy of Town & Country in their
video collection, run out to the little Mexican fireplace back near the hot tub
and hurl the tape in, laughing in the glow of the flame as the acrid black
smoke of burning plastic ascends into the neighborhood.”

“It’s a movie about the depraved, perverse, and twisted
excuses for lives that rich people lead,” Murphy writes further. “It’s about them endlessly boinking each
other. Maybe I’m just different, but I
don’t give a good healthy damn about rich people.”Mighty proletarian of you, Kev, and I concur
wholeheartedly.In one chapter of the
book (the book is separated into 52 chapters, representing each week he spent
at the nabes), he has another MST3K alumnus, Mike J. Nelson,
accompany him to a showing of CorkyRomano…for the simple purpose of
witnessing the audience suffer from its sheer awfulness:

“And please say some prayers for
Peter Falk. Peter plays Corky’s dad, a
vile, bigoted yet loving mobster on his deathbed. Now here’s a guy with a bookshelf full of
awards, who’s worked with Wim Wenders, David Mamet, John Cassavettes [sic],
Walter Hill; once the highest paid actor in TV history, a legend whose
multifaceted career spans over half a century.

Now, at seventy-four, he does Corky Romano.

You know the risk he’s running? He could croak tomorrow, and his obituary
would have to mention that his last film was Corky Romano. Would you want
that in your obit? It’d be worse than
dying of syphillis [sic]. Think of poor
Peter Sellers, whose last film was The
Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu and he never got a chance to live it down. The lesson is to be careful in your old age,
and if you are over sixty, under no circumstances do a movie starring Chris
Kattan.”

(Falk, who shuffled off this mortal coil in 2011, was spared
this indignity in the obits I read.)

Now—before you get the impression this is yet another book
poking riotous fun at films that, in a saner world, would never promenaded
before a motion picture camera, I need to tell you right off that A Year at the Movies is no such
tome.(For that, you should check out Mike
Nelson’s Movie Megacheese.Or if
you’d rather read a better book [sorry, Mike—facts are stubborn things],
acquire a copy of Better
Living Through Bad Movies—penned by my good friends Scott Clevenger and
Sheri Zollinger.It’s not only available
in Kindle form—and, as Mike “Mr. Television” Doran would say, an
actual book—but an audiobook has just been released as well!)A Year
at the Movies is all about the moviegoing experience; sure, Murphy sits in
a darkened theater…but that theater can be anywhere from the world’s smallest (the
Terrace Theater in Timonee, New South Wales) to one entirely constructed of ice
(at the Hotel de Glace, Beauport, Quebec).Kevin channels his inner Morgan Spurlock (the Fairmont, WV who directed Super Size Me) by deciding to subsist
on nothing but movie theater fare for a week (spoiler alert: it does not go
well) in one chapter, and in another takes six different women (only one being
his wife) to the same movie (Serendipity).

Kevin Murphy’s book is markedly superior to the one written
by Mr. Conniff because his insights on going to the movies will stay with you long
after you’ve returned A Year at the
Movies to the bookshelf.You’ll also
get pearls of wisdom like these:

Classic movie insights:
“I don’t think there’s one of us who does not see Boris Karloff as
Frankenstein’s monster, or Bela Lugosi as Dracula, unless you grew up with
film-school snobs for parents and you envision Max Shreck [sic] as Nosferatu/Dracula,
or, if you’re still a snob, Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck as Nosferatu or if
you’re simply a loser, giant-haired Gary Oldman. And in spite of Arnold Vasloo, the Mummy still
carries Karloff’s face for me.”

On IMAX: “IMAX lost a
lot of dough last year, and they’ll probably lose more this year, and it may
just be—not to insult anyone—because they
have the coolest film format in the world and all we get to see are bears and
stuff!Even the new president of
IMAX Filmed Entertainment admitted in an interview that IMAX has been famous
for making three types of movies: ‘Bear movies, dolphin movies, and seal movies’.”

On Merchant-Ivory: “Which would explain why the Paris was packed with
Merchant-Ivory groupies: women, alone, white, overread, educated, snobby. The kind who own Robert Graves’s autograph and
have had their picture taken with Peter O’Toole at a book signing for his latest
memoir, Dear God, But When the Hell Will
I Die? I think it’s a good guess
that the women who attend the Thursday matinee screening of a Merchant-Ivory
film at a theater in the shadow of Trump Tower are not sneaking out of their
office administrator jobs; rather, they have Constanza taking the kids to dance
lessons, and they just nipped out for the hundred-dollar salad plate at Aqavit
before Drummond dropped them off at the Paris for a show with the girls.”

On drive-ins: “I’m
hard on summer films, because I forget that people watch them simply to be
distracted and sort of entertained, and since I can do this watching a ceiling
fan, I bristle at paying good money. But
the drive-in cures all that. It’s an
event, a common experience, a picnic with the television on. The admission was only three bucks and I saw
four movies, so I won’t complain. And
besides, the young woman at the ticket booth looked at me and said ‘cool car,’
so already I had won the night.”

On the puzzling popularity ofThe Rocky Horror
Picture Show(Ivan’s note: I’ve seen the movie twice.I don’t plan on going further than that.):
“I hate The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I never, ever liked it. I don’t like the songs—face facts, they are
all essentially the same tune, over and over again. I don’t like the characters, except for Barry
Bost-wick [sic] as Brad, who, contrary to what the audience screams, is the
only cast member who is not an
asshole. I can’t stand the story, what
little there is of it, as it decays into the sort of high school musical
dreamland one can find oneself in if one has sucked down too much amyl nitrate.”

“Movies should be neither a waste of time nor a waste of
money; that’s what television’s for.”If
you’re an individual who habitually attends movies the way they were meant to
be seen—be it a single-screen revival house or what Murphy (and I) call “googolplexes”—I
think you’ll cherish this book.It’s filled
with perceptive observations from a guy who made a damn good living hoisting a
puppet over his head for nearly a decade.(And no…I haven’t forgotten Professor Bobo, either.)

3 comments:

Years back, at the turn of the century, my brother and I were being co-caregivers for our ailing mother. We'd just gotten cable, and often watched bad movies into the long night.

On one occasion, we saw one of the direct-to-video sequels to Darkman, in which Liam Neeson was succeeded by Arnold Vosloo, who is a native of the Republic of South Africa.My brother had never seen Mr. Vosloo before, so I helpfully explained his provenance, using an admittedly outdated ethnic term:

I'm a MSTie for life, and enjoyed Kevin Murphy - his Servo was an improvement on Josh Weinstein's portrayal, plus he often displayed his beautiful tenor in several musical skits.Rocky Horror - well, it's more of a "you had to be there" experience, having been to many midnight showings in my youth. Joel Hodgson has been working on a crowd-funded MST3K revival, by the way.

I liked A Year at the Movies. It may, in fact, be the best book produced by a member of the show's creative team, although Movie Megacheese has its charms (and thanks, Ivan, for the kind words about Better Living Through Bad Movies -- that's the kind of brutal candor and frank honesty one rarely sees from a critic these days).

Murphy's Servo was one of my favorite characters, but had Josh Weinstein never left the show, I would have been content, since all the things I loved about Servo (sans, perhaps, the Irish tenor) were created -- at least in embryonic form -- by Josh during the early, mostly improvised, shows at Minneapolis UHF station KTMA, and the first season on the Comedy Channel.